


Forgotten Tales

by lunadesangre



Series: Between the Lines [11]
Category: Oz (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-06
Updated: 2011-10-06
Packaged: 2017-10-24 09:32:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/261836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunadesangre/pseuds/lunadesangre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Escapism: Just because Ryan knows what it’s called, it doesn’t mean he’s going to stop doing it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forgotten Tales

**Author's Note:**

> I blame Yeats.

Ryan’s never known his grandmother. But old lady Sheridan from three houses down, when Cyril and him were kids, she always told them stories. Their folks would leave them there for one reason or another, and she’d give them milk and homemade chocolate cookies and tell them tales. Old Irish tales.

Unlike most of the neighborhood, she’d actually been born there, in Ireland, and she still had an accent, slight, but not gone. Ryan loved to listen to her. _And_ she knew Irish – _real_ Irish Gaelic instead their Dad’s three swear words – which in five years old Ryan’s book made her utterly awesome. He and Cyril went back to see her again and again, always being extremely well behaved little kids, listening attentively.

Ryan’d wanted to learn _everything_ back then. He’d wanted to see Ireland. He and Cyril even made plans...one day, they’d run away there. Shit, even swim if they had to, whatever it took.

When he was seven, they found her crumbled in an unnatural position at the foot of her staircase, all cold with her eyes opened, dull and unseeing. Ryan actually cried more than Cyril – back then, he still knew how to.

Now, he doesn’t remember much. Not the details anyway. It’s all vague impressions: the awe and fascination, no matter how gory or tragic the tales were, the desperate thirst to _learn_ – the legends, the language, _everything_ – as if, if he took enough of it all inside him, he could...what, exactly? Belong somewhere? Find his place? Somewhere he and Cyril could live and be happy, like he knew even back then they could never be at what was supposed to be their home? Some sort of haven – or some sort of _heaven_?

He only remembers enough to know that’s what it sounded like. Just like he knows that it’s all only a dream.

But he feels the pull still, the _longing_ , for a place he’s never seen, a place he'll never see. A place that doesn't really exist, except in people's imagination, expanded and magnified almost beyond recognition, until the dream becomes its own reality.

So, the few words of Irish he still has, he repeats in his head like a mantra at night, so he doesn’t loose them. Even if they don’t make sense strung together – if he lies down, closes his eyes and concentrates on the sounds, it’s like they become keys to some really old, really heavy doors opening on a forgotten kingdom, older than history, older than time itself, where none of the petty everyday bullshit matters and no one ever really dies. He hears the sounds, the melodies – strange and haunting and familiar, _hauntingly familiar_ – like an hyperrealistic dream, or a forgotten memory finally found again, safe in the sands of time, after decades of being thought lost – and he thinks he might remember how to cry after all, in this place where nothing really matters and everything and everyone does.

And until he wakes up, he’s free.


End file.
